Wednesday, November 11, 2009

The Communicating Multi-Polar World

I remember a couple of years ago that if you turned on the TV when travelling you'd get pretty much the same list of stations. It would be a couple of local ones, BBC, CNN, then something French or Italian and that would be it - maybe a dozen in total.

However in Baku there were 700ish stations with representatives of at least the following countries (there were certaintly more as many were using non-Latin script):
  • Afganistan
  • Algeria
  • Armenia
  • Azerbaijan
  • Benelux
  • Britain
  • Bulgaria
  • China
  • Cyprus
  • Czech Republic
  • Egypt
  • France
  • Germany
  • Greece
  • Hungary
  • India
  • Iran
  • Italy
  • Japan
  • Jordan
  • Kazakhstan
  • Kurdistan
  • Kuwait
  • Libya
  • Macedonia
  • Morocco
  • Oman
  • Poland
  • Portugal
  • Qatar
  • Romania
  • Russia
  • Saudi Arabia
  • Serbia
  • Spain
  • Sri Lanka
  • Sudan
  • Syria
  • The Netherlands
  • Turkey
  • UAE
  • USA
Communication is no longer from the West to the developing countries but a matrix from everyone to everyone. The multi-polar world is here, but that message is not one that would be welcomed in some places (Fox News springs to mind).

But travelling brings home the reality: not just that power is shifting, but that power has shifted.



(The building in the pic above is the Azerbaijan National Library, the Akhundov Kitabxana)